


can't no preacher man save our souls

by maggiemcnue



Category: Godless (TV 2017)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Kinda?, Modern AU, Southern Gothic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-16
Updated: 2018-07-16
Packaged: 2019-06-11 06:44:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15309690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maggiemcnue/pseuds/maggiemcnue
Summary: La Belle is suffocatingly small, like a dusty wine cellar left unused for years. Ghosts still walk the roads long after their bodies have decayed, rumors fly swift and mercilessly, and secrets fester in people like nasty tumors. The town gets the most excitement in years when a long-legged blonde comes tumbling into town; with seemingly endless cash and no true motive for staying, it's likely that she'll leave before anyone knows her name.But Callie Dunne is strange, and she almost immediately takes interest in Maggie McNue -- and nothing is ever the same.





	can't no preacher man save our souls

**Author's Note:**

> Does anyone even read fanfic for this show?
> 
> (Regardless: this is an idea I've kept in my head for a very, very long time. I will finish this, come hell or high water, even if updates can get slow or sporadic.)

La Belle is small, always has been, always will be.

It's hardly a blip on the map nowadays, firmly nestled in-between run-down ghost towns and towns where the most interesting thing is a drive-in movie theater on a Saturday night. Not even those who have an interest in history bother coming around; there are Lordsburg and Separ and Redrock to fill the aching need to see nineteenth-century Western America brought back to life.

No, La Belle is boring. The only radio stations that can be heard are country and jazz; if you fiddle the dial just right, you can hear minor league baseball in the spring, fuzzy and faded with a constant undercurrent of static. The entirety of the town is perpetually stuck with two bars of cell phone service, and the Internet is slower than molasses (not that you need much of either; everyone knows everyone in La Belle, with hardly a need to use phones, and so many of the folks feel as if they're right to be wary of devilish contraptions such as computers). There's dust everywhere, clinging to Wrangler jeans and the sides of the roads, dust that turns everyone into a pale shade of brown, like the sepia photograph in Bill McNue's office of the first miners to ever settle in the area over a hundred and fifty years ago.

A hundred and fifty years, and just about everyone who settled here has had their grandchildren's children stay firmly put. Ain't nowhere to go so far out in New Mexico anyhow, with Albuquerque far away and anything truly interesting out of state. So everyone sticks to what they know, sticks to _who_ they know.

And because the population is so small -- last time the census was taken, it was approximated three thousand, nine hundred folks had carved out a living in some form -- everyone knows everything. And because everyone knows everything, there are certain expectations of folks that need to be upheld.

Maggie McNue marrying her high school sweetheart, for example; Al Cummings was just so sweet to her, and he came from such a nice family, that to turn down his proposal would be a foolhardy thing to do. And Theo Temple taking Charlie Soule’s hand in marriage – maybe not as saccharine sweet as Mags and Al, sure, but it seemed like the logical route they would take (and Mrs. Soule would lose her mind if her darling daughter hadn’t been wed prior to the age of twenty). Sarah Doyle taking over her daddy's general shop, Sadie Rose's pa still delivering his sermons with all the gusto and ferocity of a viciously religious old man, Whitey Winn raising hell whenever he can after sunset - all expected, to a certain extent.

But then came the unexpected tragedies.

Like the car crash, almost smack dab between Lordsburg and La Belle, wherein one car's passenger came out unscathed and the other died before he made it to the hospital. When Al, the damned fool, had forgotten to wear his seatbelt, despite his wife's constant chastising for not doing so - causing him to fly straight out the windshield. And not a year later, Anna McNue dying while giving birth to her second child; she'd done just fine with William Jr., but no one anticipated the complications that came with Trudy, the internal bleeding and the swift downward spiral after that led to Bill burying his wife and forever resenting his daughter.

No one ever anticipates the complications.

Perhaps the simplest explanation is that the McNue siblings are just cursed. That sure would be the best explanation surrounding the thunderstorm of deaths that surround Bill and Maggie. Ma dead from cancer before Maggie's third birthday, Dad dying a week after Bill graduated from high school, Al's death six years later, Anna's death seven months later -- it's enough to drive any poor soul mad. Enough to drive them away from La Belle itself, to never look back and to never hear the whispers that follow them ("Did you see poor Mary Agnes at her husband's grave?", "Did you see Bill laying down a bouquet by Anna's headstone?"). Enough to drive them away from the litany of ghosts that trailed just behind them, never visible to the naked eye but a constant in their minds.

But they stay. The McNues are awful stubborn like that; they’ve always been bullheaded, both of them.

Bill, newfound sheriff after Winn Sr. retires, a shiny badge and a gun and a fresh cup of coffee every morning while he has to deal with drunkards and boys who tried to snatch something from the general store without paying for it. He gets up early, wears his crisp button-ups and dons a hat that looks like it belongs in a Clint Eastwood movie, sends the kids to a neighbor's or off to school when it isn't summer, and he tries to be the man Dad wanted him to be - no tears, constant mask of stoicism, raise his kids and hope their lack of a mother doesn't make them all fucked up.

Maggie, doing just about everything and nothing -- leaving Doyle's General Store after she talked back to a few too many people, utterly failing as a receptionist in the La Belle Motel & Saloon (and subsequently having something of a falling out with Charlie Temple), eventually settling on a factory job in Lordsburg that makes her hands calloused and hard, makes her feet constantly tired from ten hour shifts. Gives her less time to spend with William and Trudy, yes, but less time to focus on half an empty bed and the fact that she never really got rid of Al's belongings.

And life settles into a slightly uncomfortable routine for the McNue siblings. The kids grow, the town slowly recovers from two deaths nearly back-to-back, Maggie gets used to the fifteen-minute drive up Route Ten to her job, Bill gets used to the moniker 'Sheriff McNue'. Life goes on, as it is wont to do.

Until Callie Dunne rolls into town. Callie Dunne rolls into the town in her shiny convertible and nothing is ever the same. Everything that happens afterward is a direct branching consequence of that flurry of wild blonde curls and a skirt a bit too short from any of the local shops deciding to make a temporary home in La Belle.

Sin comes into La Belle when Callie Dunne does, and there will be hell to pay.


End file.
